


Debt

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Canon Backstory, Drugs, Gen, Young
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-24
Updated: 2017-02-24
Packaged: 2018-09-26 15:56:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9910193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: Young Sherlock grapples with the contradictory idea that his life belongs to Mycroft.





	

It is three days before he feels securely anchored in what everyone else calls reality, the drugs sweated out of him, his body more or less back to "normal." His appetite leaps up and down, sometimes leaving him ravenous, sometimes nauseated, sometimes merely apathetic. He's still thirsty all the time. He still hurts. He's miserable, angry, bored, in pain, and tired to death of the lectures and the pamphlets and the moralistic little sermons complete with illustrations and, in a sort of back-handed compliment, actual chemical formulae explaining what the various drugs do to him, "because you've got the education to understand it." 

Of course he has the education to understand it. He's here for brilliant, one-off designer blends, not for plain street shit. People pay him to develop this stuff...or they would if he let them, but he knows the difference in how the law treats people who make a profit and those who don't. He makes very sure he doesn't, but instead wallows in the prestige. He's Shezza, as famous in his chosen millieu as the snottiest hacker cruising the dark web. People know his name. People are excited to meet him. He doesn't need money, so long as he's Shezza. Drug lords let him come and go at his will, so long as he leaves the little bits of paper scribbled with formulae behind for the lab grunts to churn out. Mere groundlings treat him as a guest, buy him food, good booze, let him kip in their hidey-holes. Explaining the neurochemistry involved is insulting...as is the claim he's an addict. He's careful. He calculates his doses...even the extreme ones. If he ODs it's going to be on purpose.

That's the secret he carries inside, like a bright beacon. Someday he will OD. It will be on purpose. He'll die before he's thirty, in one brilliant, glorious blaze of chemical fireworks, by his own hand, at his own will. Not a junkie, owned by the shit, but as an artiste, performing his last rebellious opus before leaving without so much as a final bow. Screw them all if they can't take a joke. He'll have lived, blazed brightly, and passed in an instant, trailing clouds of glory behind him, having spent his life just the way he chose. 

To the extent he thinks of Mummy and Father, it's with a furious resentment. For people who claim to love him so much, they're remarkably absent. It's not just the dancing and the gardening and the trips abroad. It's the tears wept when he's brought in "ill," and the avoidance of what "ill" means. It's the disappearance as soon as he's up and walking again, because "after what we've been through we need a bit of a break." What they've been through?

He snorts, thinking about it. 

He's sitting on a wicker fainting couch out on the sun porch of the "retreat": a very nice, quiet place for rich people who indulge in colorful pastimes. Mycroft has arranged everything. Mycroft does that a lot...interfering sod. 

Sherlock smirks, malicious and self-amused at his own little pun. His brother, the fucking government sod. Sod-all. Sodding bastard. Sodomite.

Sherlock's been groped by the likes of his brother...old and young, twinks and bears, masculine bulls and delicate, mincing fops who work it out like a Jane Austen epigram. "It's a commonly accepted truth that any pretty young man with criminal tastes is in need of a sugar daddy to provide--both in bed, and out." Sherlock has beaten up one or two of them. He thinks he may have killed one, but isn't entirely sure, and can't risk asking Mycroft. If Big Brother does know, it's a secret he's cleaned up already, and all will be better if Sherlock says nothing. Mycroft reacts poorly to signs Sherlock has forgotten his own crimes, though Sherlock can't quite place why.

(Even now he hears a dog barking in the distant rooms of his Memory Palace, and a child singing a song about pirates...)

If Big Brother doesn't know, it's worse still. Big Brother is infuriatingly proprietary regarding Sherlock's actions--as though nothing Sherlock does is his own, but instead accrues to Mycroft's credit or discredit. At first Sherlock told himself it was just pride and vanity--Mycroft was ashamed of him. Mycroft was too proud of his own standing in the world and despised his junkie brother. (Not a junkie. An artist...) He's come to wonder if it's more than that; there's a depth of response that makes no sense to Sherlock, as though the world at some point took responsibility from Sherlock's own shoulders, from Mummy and Father's shoulders, and put it all on Mycroft, and now Big Brother writhes like Atlas under the heavy globe, with only a British lion's pelt to protect him from the weight. 

It's ridiculous. Presumptuous. Interfering. Obnoxious. Judgmental. And...damn, but so often Mycroft acts as though he's being lenient, light-handed, gentle, when he takes Sherlock's life away from him, locks him in places like this, builds still more layers of control to keep him from going back to his own preferred haunts. 

"You have to be careful," Mycroft says, over and over. "People watch what you do, Sherlock." 

"No need," Sherlock says. "You're the one with the obsession with state affairs. Give me the streets. The clubs. The fun. The music." He has a bison skull upon which he loves to put the headphones of his stereo system--headphones that are never plugged in, because Sherlock either pounds the music out loud and glorious or wears his bluetooth rig. But he still loves the symbols: death and music and depravity, all going together to define him. He's the anti-Mycroft. Free. Independent. His life is his own.

If he could just force Mike to take his stinking, officious, manipulative hands off it. How dare he? Over and over again he's moved, each time making living free harder for Sherlock to manage. 

"Please, Sherlock. It could be so much worse. I'm trying. I'm trying to give you room. Why do you keep challenging the few limits I put on you?"

Because they're limits, and because Mike dares to impose them. How dare he? How dare he?

"Someday you're going to end up in a trap I can't get you out of."

"Someday I'm going to end all the traps, and you won't be able to stop me."

The last time he said it was mere minutes ago. Mycroft stormed away, as he does. 

"It's my own life," Sherlock mutters to himself. 

And, yet...

When Mike leaves this way, it drives Sherlock mad. Big Brother steals the emotions, taking them away with him, bundled up and tied down and no longer available. As long as he's in the same room with Sherlock, Sherlock owns those feelings--the anger and rage and righteousness. But when Mycroft leaves, the feelings leave with him, and Sherlock's left empty and bewildered, unsure why the very heart of him seems to stop beating without Mike there to observe each pulse. 

He picks at the pilled fibers of the lap blanket, seeing the material in the bright sunlight. What is he doing here? What is the point? 

He stands and wraps the blanket around his shoulders and goes wandering after Mike. He's lost without his permanent spy. Big Brother's not in the private room that's been assigned Sherlock, though. Not in the lounge. Not talking with Sherlock's assigned shrink. Sherlock finds him only just in time, at the last minute, standing in the porte-cochere waiting for a cab to come get him. His most recent coat, a tidy Burberry, shows off the slim figure he's worked years to develop and maintain. The slim, furled umbrella only accentuates his long legs--he's so tall he's had to order his umbrella specially to allow it to serve as a walking stick. He's leaning slightly against one of the tall Grecian pillars in the portico, talking into a mobile phone. He turns slightly, looking back at the sanitarium, and sees Sherlock watching him. 

His face darkens. He hangs up on whoever he'd been talking to.

"Leaving so soon, brother-mine?" Sherlock walks easily out onto the marble steps, knowing that he won't be pursued. There's a GPS ankle cuff strapped tight to his leg; there are guards on constant patrol, and a fence that is more than sufficient to keep even a clever man like Sherlock inside. No one worries about the patients leaving the building. They're accounted for, regardless, each life monitored even in retreat.

"It seems I'm doing little here of any use." Mycroft's reserved, now. No longer fighting...just enduring, until he can leave.

"Why do you do this to me?" It makes no sense to Sherlock. "It's my life. What does it matter to you how I spend it?"

Mycroft blinks--the cold, reserved lizard-blink Sherlock has come to hate. "Don't be any more dishonest than you must be," he snaps. "You know perfectly well it's not that I do this to you--it's that I keep stopping you from doing it to us."

Sherlock frowns, honestly confused. "What?"

Mycroft shakes his head, disbelieving. "No man's an island, Sherlock. What you do, we must bear. Your life is not your own...no one's is. Don't you understand? You're making our hell."

Sherlock doesn't understand. He truly doesn't.

The cab pulls up, and Mycroft, sighing, shakes his head and walks away. Even trying for jaunty courage, he fails--his shoulders droop, his head goes down, he looks weary. (Atlas, with the globe on his shoulders and only a ratty lion's pelt to protect him...)

"Please, brother," he calls over his shoulder as he gets into the car. "Please--take care of yourself. I'm too tired to go on if you don't."

He means it...and Sherlock is damned if he knows why.

(The dog is barking in the Mind Palace. The girl sings on and on, and under they go...)

And yet, a trace of Mycroft's exhaustion stays with Sherlock...and that night, for no reason, he cries Mycroft's tears.

Your life is not your own...and he's so tired of carrying Mycroft's burden.

 


End file.
